A Looney Tunes live action long in the making, plus other new movies to watch this week

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(PG) 103 minutes

It all began in 1990 with an inspired piece of comic writing in the Shouts and Murmurs section of The New Yorker.

Humorist Ian Frazier dreamed up a court case starring Looney Tunes’ Wile E. Coyote as the plaintiff in a suit against Acme, the fictional manufacturer of the many specialised products the hapless predator had tried in his eternal pursuit of the Road Runner. The list included “itching powder, giant kites, Burmese tiger traps, anvils and two hundred-foot rubber bands” and the injuries to Mr Coyote caused by these dubious purchases had been serious enough to be “a major impediment” to his social life.

This sparked strong interest from Looney Tunes’ studio, Warner Bros, and shooting eventually began on a film that mixed animation with live action in the manner of the 1988 hit Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The studio’s animation division struck hard times before the film could be released and management decided it should join Batgirl, among other animated films it was shelving at the time as tax write-offs.

Forgotten Island ★★★★
(PG) 108 minutes

Memory is everything in Forgotten Island, a wonderfully inventive celebration of friendship and magic and the sometimes painful ebb and flow of friendship from childhood to early adulthood.

It’s set in the 1990s, in the pre-digital era, a time before mobile phones (remember that?), when fun was something to be made rather than downloaded. It’s set in the Philippines, where perennial mischief-maker Jo meets brainiac Raissa outside the principal’s office, both sent there for ostensibly poor behaviour (though “independent thought” would be more accurate). And it’s set in a supernatural realm reached through a magical portal, a place where dreams and nightmares come true, and where memories are either stolen or desperately clung to.

The film is written and directed by Joel Crawford – an American man married to a Filipina – and Januel Mercado, a Filipino-American animator (the pair met while working on Kung Fu Panda 2, became fast friends, and went on to make Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and The Croods: A New Age together, albeit with Crawford directing). And it positively brims with a love of Filipino culture.

(MA) 100 minutes

My annoyance with Broken English kicked in within the first minute or so, when we’re introduced to the whimsically imagined Ministry of Not Forgetting, a shadowy hall of records belonging to no particular era, like the dystopian alternate Britain of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

Some of the technology appears to be more or less 21st-century, but there are rotary phones and banks of clunky monitors, and the staff dress as if World War II never ended.

To say the least, it’s a roundabout way to introduce a documentary on Marianne Faithfull, who died last year aged 78 but is not for the moment in much danger of being forgotten.

(M) 130 minutes

When you’re a witch, time doesn’t work the way it does for the rest of us. At least, that’s one takeaway from Practical Magic 2, which sees Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman returning as the sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, members of a largely benign dynasty of witches who have dwelt in Massachusetts since Puritan days, the magic passing from one generation of women to the next.

Based on a novel by Alice Hoffman, the original Practical Magic didn’t altogether enchant either critics or the general public when it came out in 1998. But it’s since picked up enough of a cult to warrant this belated sequel, spearheaded by Bullock and Kidman as producers.

The new film appears to be set in the present day – but here’s where the timeline gets wonky. In the first film Sally’s daughter Kylie, played by Evan Rachel Wood, was aged around 11. In Practical Magic 2, we’re introduced to a new version of Kylie played by Joey King, still only in her mid-20s almost three decades on.

(G) 88 minutes

Hollywood has been in love with dinosaurs since the pioneering special effects master Ray Harryhausen and a collaborator irritated palaeontologists by inventing their own species. Named the Rhedosaurus, it starred in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in 1953.

Dinosaur movies have been proliferating ever since, boosted by the box office’s embrace of Jurassic Park in 1993.

The latest example, the Canadian animation Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie, further stretches the imagination by exploring the notion of the cute dinosaur. Returning to a story it introduced in 2020 in the Paw Patrol TV series about a team of remarkably enterprising rescue dogs, it takes the pups to their own personal Jurassic Park.

(CTC) 180 minutes

It was almost an hour into Ian Darling’s three-hour The Valley when the penny dropped. From the outset, Kangaroo Valley, the misty, secluded small town which is the subject of this contemplative documentary, felt strangely familiar to me – but not because I’d ever visited in person.

A map of the NSW Southern Highlands confirmed that Kangaroo Valley is less than an hour’s drive from the locations for another recent Australian film, James Robert Woods’ satire The Birthday Trip, where a group of unlovely media professionals gather at a winery for a largely disastrous weekend celebration.

That in turn brings home that Kangaroo Valley, in the midst of what traditionally has been dairy farming country, is now a tourist destination foremost. Darling makes no effort to hide this; indeed, he includes a scene where the locals congratulate themselves on winning a bronze medal in the NSW tourism awards. But the film, an ambitious experiment in its way, feels more like an endless tourism ad than it should.

(MA) 107 minutes

We all know the story about the black guy and the white guy who learn to get along, a durable formula that comes in a range of flavours.

It can be played for sentimental uplift, as in the Oscar-winning Green Book. But there are also the jokier, more amoral variants, such as The Hitman’s Bodyguard, with Ryan Reynolds as the bodyguard and Samuel L. Jackson as the hitman who persuades his buddy to loosen up.

Imagine those two approaches fused, and you’re in the neighbourhood of By Any Means, a luridly violent crime thriller backed by the company behind the John Wick films and directed in comic-book style by Elegance Bratton (whose one previous feature, The Inspection, was an autobiographical study of homophobia in the Marines).

(M) 97 minutes

Years ago, I shared a ride in a hot-air balloon with a man who spent the entire trip cowering beneath the rim of the wicker basket, clearly having the most miserable time imaginable.

Why did you come along, I asked him. “Because I’m afraid of heights,” he squeezed out between whimpers. “And I thought this might help me get over it.”

Judging by the squeal he let out as we crash-landed in a paddock, I don’t think it worked. But it’s a strategy that the makers of the adrenaline-pumping sequel Fall 2: Deadpoint have clearly taken to heart.

(M) 97 minutes

Sometimes a snatch of overheard conversation can conjure up the threat of violence more forcefully than any story in the media.

The thought struck me recently when I walked by a youngish man in the street who was bellowing into his phone at the woman on the other end of the line. He called her a stupid cow who’d been told “10,000 times” about the place where they were planning to meet. And 15 minutes later, I passed him again, still yelling abuse, volume undiminished.

The Australian human rights lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, found the inspiration for her career defending survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence in conversations with her grandmother who spent years working in women’s refuges and in her retirement, still agonised over the number of women at risk.

(PG) 80 minutes

Fictional detectives are expected to be eccentric – but not Inspector Jules Maigret, the tireless hero of no less than 75 novels by the equally hard-working Belgian crime writer Georges Simenon.

As originally conceived, Maigret stands out only in his normality: a respectable middle-aged fellow who smokes a pipe, appreciates his wife’s home cooking and knows Paris like the back of his hand. His genius lies in his very ordinariness, equipping him to confront the mystery of human behaviour in all its curious variety.

The Maigret books have been adapted many times for film and TV, and the character has stayed popular into the 21st century, when he’s been played by actors ranging from Gérard Depardieu to Rowan Atkinson.